Kingsley Amis was a modern and popular writer who began his career as a radical and ended up fostering an image of cantankerous conservatism. He was knighted in 1990. Amis is best remembered for Lucky Jim (1954). The title became synonymous in the ’50s along with I’m all right Jack, a film starring Ian Carmichael, who also played Jim Dixon in the Lucky Jim film adaptation. A problem for modern readers is understanding why the book was such a success at the time.
Post-war Britain was a very gray place, a world of rationing and serious social policies. The 1944 Education Act allowed bright young people from lower-middle-class and working-class backgrounds to attend university; and was intended as a piece of social engineering to break down the old barriers of class and privilege and make way for a New Britain of justice and equality after the most devastating war in history.
Lucky Jim’s underlying theme is that of a fish out of water. A working-class boy has become a college professor and is trying to figure out the whole academic thing. What is the relationship between a knowledge of Latin and the works of Matthew Arnold and doing a job job? Lucky Jim was not so lucky: he had come a long way from his house and had nowhere to go.
The tags attached to Friends were ‘Angry Young Man’ and a member of ‘The Movement’. The latter term was coined in 1954 by the literary editor of The Spectator to encompass new writers Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, DJ Enright, John Wain, Elizabeth Jennings, and Robert Conquest. John Wain disowned the existence of such a movement in 1957.
Angry Young Men is a more enduring catchphrase that is related to John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956); and 21st century readers, who are unlikely to sit through a performance, are asked to trust that it was truly electrifying in its day. Osborne, Friends, Colin Wilson and Alan Sillitoe were all Angry Young Men.
What angered them was the slow pace of social change. They may have been raised as New Britain protégés, but they encountered much opposition from Old Britons. For them, the war had not been about preserving weekends in country houses and leisure on golf courses. They found themselves on an equal footing, or so it seemed at the time. Soon the 1960s, with all its excesses and nonsense, were to sweep a great deal of dust from the cupboards of old Albion, especially the old snobbery of class and deference beloved of English gentry.
Meanwhile, living standards slowly rose from their gloomy wartime pessimism. Martin Amis, who followed his father as a successful writer, recalled growing up in the 1950s in a world of diapers drying on the fire watch and tin toilets in front of the open grill and bread and drippings and pudding from tallow. The sun never shone in the fifties and every house was relentlessly and hopelessly damp and cold.
Kingsley Amis had three children with his first wife and couldn’t give up his teaching position and risk becoming a full-time writer, despite money pouring in from his books and payment from Lucky Jim’s film rights. After leaving Swansea, he worked in Cambridge and in the United States for two years.
To earn money in the 1960s, he completed Ian Fleming’s last James Bond book, The Man with the Golden Gun (1965) and wrote his own Bond book titled Colonel Sun (1968) under the pen name Robert Markham. He was a fan of science fiction along with Robert Conquest.
Amis was also a poet and a lifelong friend of Philip Larkin, who wrote so well that Amis was intimidated. They maintained a regular correspondence and most of his letters have been published. Larkin declared in his grim style: “We are the last generation to be written.” But he couldn’t have anticipated the Internet and email.
In addition to novels and poetry, Friends also wrote nonfiction. Rudyard Kipling and His World (1975) is an examination of a writer who is endangered by political correctness. Memoirs (1990) finds Friends criticizing everyone he’s ever hated—which was quite a number—with special vilification reserved for Dylan Thomas and Roald Dahl. However, there are photos of conviviality in the book and the pleasures of the pub. Figures in the background include Peter Quennell, who helped with the publication of many Amis books, and American academic Paul Fussell, who wrote an appreciative review of Amis.
Read the full version of this essay at:
http://www.literature-study-online.com/essays/friends.html